


Between the Keeping and the Kept

by owltrocious



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Driving is Foreplay, M/M, No one talks about their feelings, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 19:26:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6163968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owltrocious/pseuds/owltrocious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan Lynch kept things: the duplicate leather bands in a drawer with three pairs of white Gucci shades, a sandwich bag of green pills and a tiny folded paper football of coke under his mattress. A scar on the crest of his hip-bone, the mottled shining pink of them bridging his knuckles top and bottom of the fist. The smell of burnt rubber and high-grade fuel and chemical sweat, oozing from a white muscle-t he wadded up and stuffed in the deepest corner of his closet. These things, and no more, a permitted weakness.</p>
<p>These things and no more. It was midnight on the second of July.</p>
<p>[Or, if the incident of the gifted Mitsubishi had gone differently.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Keeping and the Kept

Ronan Lynch kept things: the duplicate leather bands in a drawer with three pairs of white Gucci shades, a sandwich bag of green pills and a tiny folded paper football of coke under his mattress. A scar on the crest of his hip-bone, the mottled shining pink of them bridging his knuckles top and bottom of the fist. The smell of burnt rubber and high-grade fuel and chemical sweat, oozing from a white muscle-t he wadded up and stuffed in the deepest corner of his closet. These things, and no more, a permitted weakness.

These things and no more. It was midnight on the second of July.

His phone buzzed. He lifted his head to check it, read _look outside_. He frowned and waited for the follow up, fast on its heels: _seriously you fuck look out the window_. Ronan swung his legs over the edge of the bed, scrubbed a hand over his face, and walked to his door – listening, hearing nothing. He slipped out to the main room, around Gansey sleeping in a throat-constricting sprawl of skin and hideous pajama shorts with his glasses on, and looked out the wall of windows. There was a car downstairs, and a wraith leaning on it, chin tilted up.

_come downstairs_

_now_

Ronan leaned his forehead on the glass. His breath misted on it, bringing the funk of stale beer back on him. He pulled on a pair of sweats – Gansey's? – and stood in front of the door, vertigo-struck as if there were two paths diverging in front of him but neither seemed good or safe. Two hours before, he had watched Noah whimper and spasm and cry and suffocate on his own blood in a ghostly pantomime, the blows breaking him to pieces offscreen and invisible. He imagined it was a little like what his father had looked like when he was beaten to death, though less efficient.

After that, Ronan Lynch was past making decisions. Ronan Lynch was his skin and his blood and a yawning, cavernous terror in his guts that twisted until he thought he'd vomit. He had drank and smeared a guilty curious fingertip of Kavinsky's cocaine under his tongue and still thought his flesh was going to peel back if he wasn't careful with it. He opened the door in bare feet and walked down in the dark, a phantom fingernail on the small of his back a promise -- a promise in that and the texts he'd started keeping his phone on his person to look at whether he answered them or not. This was undoubtedly a mistake; a king on each shoulder weighed a man down to his grave.

The look on Kavinsky's face when the door to the lot opened was fast and gone but he'd seen it: some raw misery backlit by a cell phone screen transmuted flashing to shock and wariness then glossed with pleasure. The other young man pocketed his phone, opened the passenger door and – instead of waving Ronan over like he'd expected – climbed inside. Kavinsky winged a set of car keys at him overhand and he caught them, breathing hard for no reason but this: he did not know what would happen next.

"Well, get in it," Kavinsky said. "This one's for you."

"No shoes," Ronan responded, but he was already walking. The interior lights were blue, ghostly themselves, washing out Kavinsky's narrow shoulders and hollow cheeks. He crossed in front and opened the driver's door, sank into the deep seat and pushed his bare toes against the warm texturized rubber and metal of the pedals: clutch, brake, gas. The gearshift was slick under his palm. He closed his eyes and breathed it in, smoke-liquor-sex-misery, his mouth watering reflexively.

"That's it," Kavinsky said, dark like an oil-slick.

Ronan slit his eyes and tilted his chin, watching Kavinsky watch him.

"This doesn't mean with you," Ronan said.

"Sure," Kavinsky said back. His smile was all teeth.

 

*

The vibrating intensity of the Mitsu was magnified in the driver's seat, anxious and eager. Ronan chewed the inside of his lip and found a long strip of road to put the car through its paces, night-driving, the cut of blue-tinged headlights and sallow street lamps all he had to see by. It made the space feel closer, closest, silent but for the roar of the engine and Kavinsky's fidgeting. He made the shift from third to fourth smooth and powerful, closed his eyes for a dangerous second to feel like flying.

Kavinsky's hand wormed under his elbow, jostling his grip on the gearshift, and planted itself on his thigh. Through the thin sweatpants his grip was intimate; moreso when he slid across further and those fingertips dragged down to his inner thigh, found the inseam and scratched at it.

"You tuck to the left, then," Kavinsky said.

Ronan snorted, followed the road out of town, away from the street lights and restive wandering people. A fine trembling had started in his toes and fingers. He didn't move the hand. His skin burned hot under it, his heart sick-skipping at each press and scratch when he flexed his thigh to push down on the pedals. The speedometer climbed precipitously as rural privacy fell open around them. He glanced over and saw Kavinsky's free hand holding the door, his feet braced and knees spread, mouth half-open and eyes half-shut. He had a wild erratic urge to let go of the wheel, take the consequences. The car connected them, all points of contact narrowed into darkness and the precision of it – unsubtly erotic, like those damp parted lips.

Ronan slammed on the brakes. If Kavinsky hadn't been braced for impact or one sort of another he'd have been on the dash – " _fuck!_ " he exclaimed – and spun them out onto the gravel shoulder in a shriek of tires, asphalt, and lost traction.

"Lynch," Kavinsky started in, but Ronan was jerking up the parking-brake and coming onto his knees in the seat before he could finish. He took Kavinsky's chin in one hand and his hair in the other, yanked his head back, fingertips pressed into the hinge of his jaw. The moment spun out long, silent, heaving –

Then he brought their mouths together, half a kiss and half something else nameless. This was the knife, he knew, and he'd guided it into his own guts like it was the easiest thing in the world. Kavinsky grabbed him around the hip and under his arm, bony fingers splayed over his iliac crest and digging into the broad sweep of his lats. It was spit and teeth, shaking lips. He thought of Kavinsky's face when he'd dreamt up the incomplete Camaro – still proud, _Hey man, I'm sure he'll like this one. And if he doesn't, fuck him_. It was desperately unfair to Gansey, but: it still burnt in him, no less than the moment of honest horrible blankness when he'd left, the rage licking in soon after like Kavinsky was doing now to his mouth, pliant under him for a surprising shift.

He hadn't stopped giving him things –

_Giving him things_. Like a fucking car. Ronan groaned into him, crowded with thoughtful if inaccurate attempts to hand him an invitation on a confused, doubled-back, too-sharp kind of platter.

Kavinsky pulled back, wresting himself away and opening his door. He was out of the car in a flash, leaving Ronan still bent over the passenger seat, lips aching and heart sank into his toes. He'd already come this far; he wasn't sure if it was possible to go back, and then his door opened too. Kavinsky leaned in, arm braced on the roof like the tension between them couldn't incinerate them both. He got his breath enough to say: "Come fuck me on the hood of this car."

It was somehow not a request. His eyes were narrowed, his usually full lips pressed thin, his other hand gripping the top of the door white-knuckled. There was anger, no mistaking it, and hunger, and something that seemed to be raw and bleeding underneath all the rest. The weight of it, the unknowable if not unclear promise of this night spilling out to other nights and other misgivings and other car-crash miseries, pressed down on Ronan but he swung his legs out and stood, forcing Kavinsky back.

"All right," he said, his own voice an alien and dangerous echo in the empty night.

Kavinsky swallowed, visibly, eyes tracking down Ronan's bare chest, the little left to the imagination under thin sweats, the bony arches of his feet. Ronan expected a comeback, a barb, something to lighten this. It didn't come. Kavinsky turned from him and said, "Shut off the headlights."

"No," Ronan said.

He hadn't seen another car for the entire drive; he doubted one would come along now. But he didn't want to lie about this, pretend it wasn't what it was. Kavinsky boosted himself onto the hood of the car and reclined back, shirt riding up over his stomach, jeans slung low and tight. At this angle, under the natural light, Ronan could see the outline of his dick sudden and shocking in shadow. It was vulgar and human. He walked on unsteady feet toward all that questionable bounty, pricks of rock and sharper things on the soles of his feet. The pain was appropriate.

He didn't have the heart to say, _give me some fucking pointers, here_.

Kavinsky had been in his head. He knew. Ronan's skin felt too tight. He shoved Kavinsky's knees apart and hooked his arms under his calves, dragged him down the hood of the car in a squeak of skin and slide of fabric that pulled the white shirt up to his shoulders. Kavinsky closed his eyes. "Don't," Ronan said.

"Didn't think you cared, princess," he hissed back, but he was watching again.

Ronan splayed his hands on those ribs, found a mark like a cigarette burn on his side. He scratched, soft first and then with intent at an appreciative arch that pushed them together just shy of too hard. Kavinsky's hands found his wrists, gripped, and pushed one down to palm the trapped hardness of him. "Feel that," he said.

"Yeah," Ronan muttered, struck stupid by the soft-heavy- _there_ sensation of the length of him through rough cloth. There was a power-play here beyond the sort of game he was used to; this wasn't Kavinsky texting him the word _faggot_ sixteen times at three-thirty-seven in the morning. This was something being given. It put him off his balance.

He was, he realized abruptly, afraid to step wrong and end this in a hail of broken glass and hard-fought loss. He heard his own voice, _it was never gonna be you and me_ , and wondered if he was taking that back or just _taking something_ he didn't deserve. Danger, surpassed somewhere back at the edge of town, too late to avoid.

"Christ, Lynch, you're terrible at this," Kavinsky muttered, hooking his heels into the backs of his thighs and pushing his hips up in a filthy grind. "I'm on the hood of a car _I fucking gave you_ with your hand on my dick, do I need to show you the next step or can you figure it out?"

Ronan considered him, then smiled as a warning before cracking the palm of his hand across Kavinsky's cheek. The other boy's mouth fell open on a soundless exhale, his grip on Ronan's other wrist going lax. His legs flexed again, thoughtless this time. "I think I've got it figured out," Ronan replied.

"Yeah, good," he said, unbuttoning his own pants. "Get me out of these."

Ronan imagined hitting him again, maybe again for good measure, and filed that away under _parts of himself he wasn't ready to think too hard about_. Together they stripped down jeans and underwear and then Kavinsky was bare-assed and snarling, white skin on white paint washed out with the blue glow of the headlights and the night sky. He wasn't beautiful; he was razor-boned and a little sallow and all of his muscles stood out in sharp relief, unsoftened by easy living or, Ronan thought, enough food at the right times. He had a livid scar on the outside of his right thigh.

He went to his knees like strings cut to yank off Kavinsky's unlaced hi-tops, leaving his pants in a pile on top of them. The grill was hot on his arms as he took hold of the underside of Kavinsky's thighs, fingers bridging that deep slick scar on one side, and mouthed at the sparse hair and lean muscle next to his knee. Kavinsky's nails scratched over the bristle of his scalp above his ears. Fingers linked at the base of his skull, forcing him to look up at a haughty smile with a hollow bottom. "Open your mouth."

Gravel dug into his knees, his toes. One of Kavinsky's hands wrapped around the base of his own dick, thumb pressing down to angle himself, and the other smeared across Ronan's lips, bruising them against his teeth. He opened, pulse galloping as those fingers – that taste again – pushed in, more than just a brush this time: the first three pressing his tongue down and knuckles against the back of his throat, palm on his chin. He gagged, swallowing around it, a hard spasm of _want_ rolling down his back.

It was a relief, somehow, the filth of it and the familiar hideous edge that Kavinsky had been hiding under silence and unpredictable bluntness all this night-drive. Ronan skipped his gaze down to that cock, thought about it against his soft palate, the head slick and the surprising fold of foreskin pulled back until Kavinsky stroked himself to tug it up while he watched. It was hard to gauge from this angle if it was average or far above average; either way, it was all he could focus on.

"Come on," he mumbled around the fingers in his mouth, then bit down not-gently.

This was dripping slow like poison, syrup, and he needed it to speed up, needed to forget himself and the monumental implications of doing this, kneeling by the side of the road in Gansey's crew sweats. Benediction, of a sort. "Thirsty," Kavinsky said, permissive.

The fingers slipped out and wiped spit across his neck on the way to grasp his shoulder. He leaned in, Kavinsky slid further down the hood to plant his feet on the ground, and then his mouth was full again: the first moment dry then slick and silken. Kavinsky groaned above him and dragged his cock across Ronan's lips, tongue, pushed against the back of his throat. Ronan made a sound, low in his chest, and tilted his head against the pressure – surprised and miserably aroused as the other boy met his movement with a tilt of hips and was in him, his nose pressed to wiry stubble and his air cut off and his throat achingly stretched.

" _Shit_ ," Kavinsky hissed. Ronan flinched as if to move back and there were hands holding him down, keeping him there; he swallowed reflexively again and again, eyes watering, cock throbbing. He fumbled one hand into the sweatpants, past the band of his boxer-briefs, got himself in a tight grip and gasped wetly when Kavinsky pulled back. He let him drop from his mouth and pressed a bite to his thigh, hard, snarling, jerking himself. He tasted blood and Kavinsky cried out, curling over him, all heat and wet. Sparks behind his eyes.

"Don't choke me on your dick, asshole," he growled.

"Liar," Kavinsky replied. "C'mere again and I'll fuck your face til you come."

Ronan shuddered and stood, shoving Kavinsky onto his back. His narrow face was alight with rude satisfaction. Ronan took one of his calves in hand below the knee and flipped him, unkind about it, dragging him so he was draped over the car with his knees half-bent, skinny hips up. He grinned over a shoulder, hands splayed on the hood. Ronan used his wrist to turn down the elastic edges of the sweats and his underwear, forcing them out of the way and drawing himself free.

"Nice, Lynch," Kavinsky said.

"Shut up." He skinned the pants the rest of the way down, stepped out of them, breathless with his nakedness. Both of them were glowingly white and backlit in hard lines, raw and red where they weren't pale. He was struck by the similarities between their bodies in a heady sweet rush, the knobs of Kavinsky's spine beneath his fingers in a grand reversal. "How good did you plan ahead?"

"The question is, would I let you," his voice was lower than expected, challenging.

"Yeah, you would," Ronan said. His slid a thumb down, down, pressing with intention at delicate tender skin that flexed under his touch. "You're going to."

" _Fuck_ , right." He shuddered, hips jackknifing away and back again. "Glove box."

Ronan moved fast, as if the moment would shatter given too much space between their bodies, popping open the compartment with Kavinsky's eyes on him like a brand the whole time. There was a small container, black as jet and shot through with green, clearly a dream thing. He grabbed it, and saw under the small light within also a scrap of paper. _This one's for you. Just the way you like it: fast and anonymous_. He swallowed something like shame, looked up through the windshield and saw Kavinsky's expression. _Scorched_ , he thought again, but still burning, still not gone, some scrap of a fucking chance dangled in front of him. The glass made it distant, somehow, possible to look and see each other from inches but miles.

It was frightening to be so _wanted_ , wanted like a fire, like a collision.

He stood and slammed the door behind him for good measure, found himself between Kavinsky's legs again. He bent and sank his teeth into the bridge of muscle at the juncture of shoulder and neck, shaken, kneading his fingers against the sparse meat of the other boy's ass. Kavinsky sighed and pressed into it. He reached up and wrapped a hand around his throat from behind, squeezed and bent him back, pushed his cock against him for good measure. "Feel _that_ ," he murmured against his neck, biting again. Kavinsky's throat worked as he swallowed and Ronan gripped tighter, listened to the moment his breath stopped wheezing out and he shuddered. "I'll give it to you."

Kavinsky clawed hard at his wrist, his forearm, gouging in deep. He let him fight, back arching and legs straining, the only sound his own harsh breathing and the slap of skin on fiberglass. He let go when the other boy started to still and twitch, listened to his sodden gasps, one ending on a whimper that was stunning in its quiet admission. Kavinsky was the knife in his gut, but he was the thing that Kavinsky could break himself against: strong enough to stand it.

He opened the jar and dipped his fingers in to the viscous, slippery grease. It smelled like musk and summer nights, with a hint of something like the adrenaline taste at the back of his throat after a race. He leaned away to get a better angle and gripped the back of Kavinsky's thigh under his ass, thumb tucked against his balls, then pressed two fingers into him in one long easy slide. He had to swallow at the intimacy of it, the sensation of a person's body opening up to let him in, all burning heat and slick-soft flesh and clutching muscle.

"Lynch!" His voice cracked, endearing and too honest. "Fuck you, goddamnit, fuck—"

Ronan twisted his wrist and pumped his hand, working him, third finger in and there was the speed he'd been aching for: all thought cleaned out of his head except the smell and taste and feel of this magnificent creature under him, giving and giving hard, with teeth. He smeared the rest of the grease over himself and lined up, sank in halfway on the first push, groaning through his clenched jaw. Kavinsky's nails clawed squeaking down the paint and gravel scuffed under their feet. He leaned his weight, planting a palm next to Kavinsky's head – thought, incongruous, _he's so much smaller than me_ – and moved with instinct and intention. It was harder than he'd thought, but easier too.

"Fuck me," Kavinsky demanded, slapping a hand back to grab his hip, all fingernails and scraping pain. "Give it to me, come on, fuck me, make me –"

Ronan snarled and worked his hips back an inch to slam forward as hard as he could justify, the smack of flesh on flesh and Kavinsky's choked yell cutting off the rest of that dirty sprawl of words. He didn't stop from there, pinning Kavinsky with a hand on his shoulder and striving against him, faster and harder and so deep it felt impossible that he could be accommodated like this, such tender agony. For his part, Kavinsky grunted and rocked into him and finally turned his head to press one cheek against the hood. Ronan watched his brows draw together and his mouth twist, flinching with each thrust.

It was everything, it was too much. He spat out an expletive, another, rhythm stuttering. Kavinsky's eyes flashed open and he grinned fiercely; they were looking at each other too close. "Come in me, do it," he demanded.

Ronan buried his face against his trembling back to moan, low and long and helpless, pulsing into the tight grasp of him. His orgasm was blinding, like being struck, and then Kavinsky was wriggling away and he _was_ struck: a fist across the bridge of his cheek hard enough to stagger him, adding impossibly onto the whole stacking cascade.

"Knees," Kavinsky ordered. He dropped, blinking, cock wet against his stomach and blood spattering onto his loose hands from the split skin. He opened his mouth without being told, had no compunction about swallowing Kavinsky's dick down this time, shaking from his own climax, feeling expansive and scoured clean. He reached up and pushed his fingers back in, his own come dripping down his hand. Kavinsky gave as good as he got, granting him a half a breath when he thought he'd pass out or choke then down his throat again, all flashing smile and flexing stomach and a bright laugh as he came, holding Ronan's head in place until he swallowed. Then he let go and Ronan sank back onto his heels. His bottom lip throbbed, cut against his teeth.

"C'mon, get in the car, jesus, you're fucking naked," Kavinsky said, still with the edge of a laugh. Ronan laughed too, found it bubbling up from somewhere under his heart, aching and light like when he'd thrown the molotov but a thousand times stronger. Euphoria, shame not settling in just yet.

Kavinsky took off his shirt and wiped himself down with a casual lack of self-consciousness, tossed it to Ronan, who found a dry corner to wipe his mouth and throat and down to his softening prick. They found pants and dressed. Ronan tossed the filthy shirt in the backseat floorboard.

"Souvenir?" Kavinsky sneered.

Ronan looked at him, an eyebrow raised. "I've got a whole car for that."

"Get me breakfast, fuckweasel," he replied and collapsed into the passenger seat. He threw an arm over his face. "I earned it, popping your cherry."

"Jesus," Ronan said, a little disgusted.

The tension between them had eased, like a dissipating storm, the promise of an explosion leaking out. He realized he could breathe for the first time in days. It was fucked – _he_ was fucked – but he couldn't help but feel he'd escaped something horrible, simultaneously making a much bigger mess out of his whole goddamn life. He started the car, considered that neither of them had shirts and he had no shoes. Considered that he was Ronan Lynch, and Kavinsky was Kavinsky. Considered that in the morning, he'd be visiting Adam to pretend to do his homework.

"I'm still going home," he said into the quiet.

Kavinsky frowned. "Cross that bridge later."

Ronan breathed out and guided them onto the road again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> There are a mountain of what-ifs for these two -- things that could've gone different -- and this is one.


End file.
